You’ve got to feel some sympathy for Alan Moore.  The weirdbeard bard who demonstrated what truly great writing can achieve in the form of a comic script is subject as we all are to the hype announcing the arrival of Watchmen, the film of the comic series that Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons drew.  Only, in Moore’s case, he wants nothing at all to do with the movie.

It’s a stance which says a lot about the Northampton writer’s integrity, that he’s prepared to forsake the pots of gold that Hollywood can offer.  Money doesn’t interest Moore: what he’s earned over the years has been spent excavating the cellar of his modest home into a labyrinth, on buying a farm in Wales that friends of his live on, and on various magical texts and artefacts.  He’s a man of curious but relatively simple means, and trying to embroil him in movie biz hype and bullshit just doesn’t work.

Presumably someone told him how amazing the film of From Hell, his tour de force collaboration with artist Eddie Campbell, would be.  Hmm.  And then there’s the big screen version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  Whoops.  So even though I rated the film of V for Vendetta — by Moore and artist David Lloyd — by that point Moore was sick of the whole business of turning his impeccable works of graphic fiction into homeopathically diluted interpretations aimed at 16-24 year old baseball cap wearers.

You could look at Moore’s entire career as a succession of instances of him getting huffy and taking the ball away.  But that’s to miss the ethical stance he takes on his work, easily done since so few people have such an outlook.  He’s burned his bridges with DC Comics, fed up of their continued ownership of work he created for them two decades and more ago.  Watchmen was supposed to revert to ownership by Moore and Gibbons when, as expected, it went out of print.  Only it never has been, what with it being eulogised ever since, copies being on university syllabuses etc, and DC have made a fortune from it.  So tired of DC’s dissembling, dubious accountancy, and censorship is Moore that he now has nothing to do with the publisher at all, not even taking their money: his royalties go to his artistic collaborators.

So, will I be watching Watchmen?  Yes, if only as an exercise in seeing a translation from one medium to another.  The trailers haven’t got me convinced, what with the slo mo action sequences, impossibly gravelly voices, and sexed-up characters.  Somewhere along the line, and to noone’s great surprise, director Zack Snyder has turned Moore’s vision of out of shape egotists parading their insecurities in vigilante costumes into a tale of heroic sexbeasts clad in spandex dancing to the tune of a bombastic soundtrack.

Or, you know, maybe I’ve got it wrong, and the not-at-all homophobic director of 300 really is a boy wonder when it comes to bringing comics to the screen.  Let’s hope so.  But whether or not the film is any good, the comic will continue to be a piece of flawed genius.  And Alan Moore will continue to bring his wonders to the world, as he has with ABC Comics titles Promethea and Top 10, in his ongoing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (soon to be brought to discerning audiences by Knockabout), his pornographic tale Lost Girls from Top Shelf, and his forthcoming second novel, Jerusalem.  And anyone who can maintain such a high quality and variety in such a prolific workload clearly does have functioning marbles.  If anything, we need more people to emulate his creative stance, rather than continue to serve up watered down versions of what only the man himself can come up with.